Staff Backend Engineer - Ads Formats

About the role

The Ads Supply pod grows Faire's Ads business by expanding where, how, and in what format ads show up. Almost all of Faire's ads today are promoted product listings, and we'll unlock top-of-market opportunities for our advertisers with premium creative formats. As a technical leader, you'll own building the high-scale, low-latency systems that serve and render premium formats like video and brand creative across every surface and device. Working hands-on across the full stack and co-shaping the experience with Product and Design, you'll unify creative serving, formats, and rendering into one cohesive system, partnering closely with Ads Delivery and Ads Bidding and enabling fast, measurable experimentation. You'll also set the technical direction for ad formats at Faire and shape the roadmap for what we build next.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical vision: Define the end-to-end architecture for our next-generation ad formats, including a unified serving layer that keeps the experience fast, scalable, and reliable across surfaces and devices.
• Build the systems behind every format: Design highly automated systems for ad format serving, optimization, and A/B testing that maximize business outcomes.
• Lay the foundations for future formats: Build the framework-level solutions that make new formats faster to ship and deepen how well we understand our users.
• Invent what comes next: Conceptualize, prototype, and run experiments on new ad format ideas, drawing on market trends, user behavior, and advertiser needs to find the opportunities with real business impact.
• Drive cross-functional impact: Operate as a product builder who brings customer understanding to the work, partnering closely with Product, Design, Data Science, and other engineering teams to deliver cohesive, high-impact solutions.
• Raise the engineering bar: Advocate for and apply best practices across availability, scalability, operational excellence, and cost management.
• Mentor and lead: Guide and upskill other engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence, ownership, and continuous learning.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with 3+ years as a technical leader driving complex, cross-team projects.
• Deep expertise in building and scaling ad formats or similar user-facing content delivery systems.
• Excellent programming and system design skills, with a proven track record of leading and operating highly available, high-performance, low-latency backend systems at scale.
• AI-native, using modern AI tooling as a core part of how you deliver impact and embedding AI best practices into your daily workflow.
• A product builder who understands customers deeply, helps shape what gets built, and turns ambiguous business problems into clear product and technical direction.
• Strong collaboration, mentorship, and leadership: a compelling vision, clear communication, and the ability to drive concurrent projects and influence strategy with a collaborative leadership style.
• Experience with cross-platform development.
• Prior experience building or operating creative serving infrastructure for digital advertising, especially for new and rich ad formats (e.g., video or interactive creative).
• Experience with machine learning and gen-AI in advertising, such as ranking, retrieval, and optimization.
• Technologies we use and teach:
• Backend: Kotlin, Java 16, Hibernate, Guice, Jersey
• Search and data: Elasticsearch, FAISS, Redis, DynamoDB
• Communication: Protocol Buffers, HTTP, JSON
• Infrastructure: AWS, Kubernetes, Buildkite, Datadog
• Salary Range:
• Canada: the pay range for this role is $190,500 - $262,000 per year.
• This role will also be eligible for equity and benefits. Actual base pay will be determined based on permissible factors such as transferable skills, work experience, market demands, and primary work location. The base pay range provided is subject to change and may be modified in the future.
• Hybrid Faire employees currently go into the office 3 days per week on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and a third flex day of their choosing (Monday, Wednesday, or Friday). Additionally, h

Benefits

Additional Information

About Faire Faire is a technology wholesale platform built on the belief that the future is local. Independent retailers around the globe collectively represent a multi-hundred-billion-dollar wholesale market that has historically been fragmented and offline. At Faire, we're using the power of tech, data, and machine learning to connect this thriving community of entrepreneurs across the globe. Picture your favorite boutique in town - we help them discover the best products from around the world to sell in their stores. With the right tools and insights, we believe that we can level the playing field so businesses can grow and local communities can thrive. We're looking for smart, resourceful and passionate people to join us as we power the shop local movement. If you believe in community, come join ours.

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